


The Snow Man

by dem_hips



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dem_hips/pseuds/dem_hips
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Frost embarks upon a plan to be believed in.</p><p>Written for a (self-imposed) Christmas Carol challenge, based on "Frosty the Snowman," with the feel of the Ventures cover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Snow Man

This year was going to be different.

 If asked, Jack wouldn’t be able to say why he felt that way.  Maybe it was the weather reports that it was going to be a mild winter; “Sounds like a challenge,” he’d remarked to a television he could hear through someone’s window, and, grinning cheekily to no one in particular, he’d dashed off to wait out the autumn in a cooler clime.  Or maybe it was the hopes of kids rising up on the tail end of those reports, wishing fervently for the fun and relaxation of a well-timed snow day, replacing tests and homework with sledding and snowball fights.  After all, if he delivered when all hope seemed lost, they had to believe in him, right?

 Right?

 In any case, no one was around to ask, to question his tenuous reasoning, which was just as well.  He spent all of October conjuring up chillier air, chasing trick-or-treaters into November with biting winds that made the jack-o-lantern candles flicker and dance.  For those in the northwest quarter of the globe, he provided extra fridge space for Thanksgiving side dishes on back porches and front stoops, and then smirked devilishly as he left roofs frost-slick, slowing light hangers to a careful crawl.

 That was going to be the extent of his pestering the big guy this year, he’d decided.  No trying to sneak into the Pole, no transforming the glaciers outside his windows into eight hundred foot-tall ice sculptures of Bunnymund.  Doubtless his Christmas spirit would only last so long, and by the last week or two of the year he’d be bombarding North and his team of reindeer with frigid winds or stinging sleet, however he was feeling at the time.  Not that it was anything he couldn’t handle—and besides, Jack rather suspected the big man enjoyed the challenge.

But at least for now, he’d lay off.  Time to focus.  This was the year.

Jack would never admit it, because it was bordering dangerously on Guardian territory, but he’d thought a lot about this since last winter.  He had a _plan_.  And if anything, perhaps the sheer novelty of that would be enough for him to succeed.

* * *

He let Christmas sweep by with nothing more than the occasional flurry and icy roads every few mornings.  Any snow around the holiday tended to be lumped in with the ever-growing definition of “Christmas Miracles,” and he wasn’t about to let the big man steal his glory.  Not again.  He’d learned his lesson after the first few times—never mind that the White Christmas tradition had been _his_ idea.

No, best to just let it pass by quietly.  The doldrums of January were _his_ playground: shortened days, frigid mornings, children and adults plodding back to school and work like would-be escaped prisoners being led back to their cells, sugar plum dreams packed away for another year.  The second Thursday in January.  That was the sweet spot.  Just late enough in the season that people were really starting to believe those sensible forecasts, just late enough in the week that they wouldn’t be expecting a thing.

On Wednesday afternoon, Jack watched from his perch upon an ice-kissed street light, watching kids in colorful winter coats and hats spilling from a nearby elementary school.  Their sneakered feet stepped solidly onto cold but dry ground; when the busses and cars pulled up to take them home, their tires were sure on the pavement.  One of the driest winters in recent memory.  As Jack looked on, he watched some kids glance up at him—past him—at the clear, pale blue sky.  He heard a young girl sigh heavily and turn her brown eyes away.  And that was how he knew it was time.

Jack dipped into a store of patience he didn’t know he had.  Not even the most hopeful would suspect the chillier winds that sped them along on their way home; the fog building on car windows was too subtle to be anything more than a common wintery trial.  By the time the clouds rolled in and shrouded out most of the sky, it was too dark to bother anyone.  The thick blanket rolled over the stars as if tucking them into bed, but Jack left a clear halo around the bright gibbous moon, pointedly.

 “I hope you’re watching!” he called up, pausing in his gentle ministrations to set the bright white disk in his sights. “I want you to see this—the day people finally believe in me!  No thanks to you.”

 With that oath, he turned away from the skies and back onto the roofs of the sleepy houses below him—and there, across the street, was a little golden man, blinking at him in bemusement.

Jack raised a hand in his usual late-night greeting, then thought better of it and clambered up to perch atop his staff.  ”Don’t mess this up for me, Sandy!” he called, trying not to let the desperation sound in his voice.  He wasn’t sure exactly what the Sandman could do to ruin his perfectly planned evening, not even sure what he was asking of the little golden man, or if he would even understand what Jack intended to do.  But the Sandman seemed to pause and think for a moment, tapping a stubby finger against the round little tip of his chin, and then brightened, nodding at Jack with a wide smile.  As Jack watched, just for a moment, Sandy’s smile narrowed into a conspiratorial little grin, and then he hopped off the roof and in through a bedroom window, and Jack was left with the feeling that he would just have to trust him.

Well.  If he had a choice to trust any Guardian, he was probably most okay with trusting Sandy.  Not much use in worrying about it now.  It was time to truly begin.

If it had been a hundred years or more ago, perhaps in a different place, there would have been a tall clock watching over the people around it, and its ticking and measuring would lead it to chime ten times.  But it was far too late in the twentieth century for that, and for those still awake it was the changing of programs on their televisions or the silent shift of the red numbers glowing upon digital clocks that were the harbingers of the hour.  For those still awake, there were many more things to be looking at than the view out of the window.  Jack hopped nimbly to perch atop a streetlight.

 Within its sickly yellow glow, from the clouds gathered over the star-filled sky, the first flakes skidded along a chill winter wind.

 At first, they came in short bursts, wrapping around invisible air currents like bows on a long-awaited present, left forgotten under a drooping Christmas tree.  As they approached, Jack gave them a friendly grin, a familiar grin, and then leapt back into the air, jumping and dancing before them like a piper before sleepwalking children.

 From every corner of the sky, flurries and flakes rolled out in droves to join their fellows, flitting in a dance sweeter than sugar plums, brighter than smiles.  Jack drove them like a shepherd, freezing the ground before them for their comfort.  When they fell to rest, they found the grass tipped with white, the roads icy and accommodating.  Against the dark night they moved silent and stealthy like thieves, but the streetlights, the golden sand pouring out from children’s windows, the bright moon overhead: they revealed Jack’s secret as the snow piled in layers upon every surface.  Rooftops strung with glittering abominations of artificial icicles found their decor muted, covered over by a soft white blanket.  Below, the snow equalized street and grass and sidewalk—and even lakes, their surfaces shuddering to a still, timeless halt, were buried like the rest.  Dark, leafless tree branches that had once shuddered in cool winds, casting ghostly shadows upon bedroom windows, found themselves draped and brightened with snow, standing more like sentries, solid and silent and protective, above the town.

 By the time the long-obsolete clock might have rang only twice, the snow had learned to mingle, to fall in powdery sheets over and over and over one another, and had any lucky, sleepless soul been watching, they might have found themselves caught, mesmerized by the way the falling snow shimmered under the moon’s bright attention.

 But no one was awake to watch.  Under thicker and thicker blankets of snow and dreamsand, the town slumbered on.

 Jack painted on windows the motifs of the world that had surrounded him for nearly three hundred years: delicate tendrils and bold flowers of ice crystals spread out from his touch, growing rapidly in chains on house windows and store windows, water pipes and street lights.

 He painted and cavorted and whooped into the resoundingly silent night air until the snow had buried curbs, car tires, porch steps.  He danced in the chill and the moonlight like some wild spirit from days of yore until white had engulfed everything, until the moon’s reflection off the surface of the snow shone brighter than the moon itself.  And then, returning to his perch on the corner of a snow-dusted roof, he let the clouds finish, allowed the last of the flakes to drift upon the faint winds like the most delicate of petals, and then, just as soon as it had begun, the snow slid to a halt.

 The town sat cold, as silent and still as a snowglobe laid to rest.  Every now and then a faint breeze would rifle through dead branches and pluck a last shake of snowflakes from their midst, but beneath Jack Frost’s gaze the town remained unmoving, holding its breath, frosted all over in white.

Tomorrow, there would be feasting.  Tonight, for as long as it was still left, Jack settled in a snowbank and dreamed of how it would feel to be believed in. 

* * *

The people emerged in shifts, blinking blearily at the unexpected brightness laid out beneath a thick gray sky.  First came the adults who awoke with the sun.  With their morning cups of coffee steaming in one hand, they emerged to find a foot and a half of snow in place of their morning papers.  Some stared in awe, some shook their heads in disbelief.  Some cursed him, spitting his name sarcastically under their coffee-scented breaths into the frozen blockade before them before turning back for shovels, but Jack didn’t care because theirs wasn’t the attention, the belief, that he craved.

 Next came the nine-to-fives, the high school students, the middle schoolers, the parents thereof, who only peered out windows with their phones to their ears or their attentions glued to radios before turning over in their beds, choosing covers of fleece over covers of snow.  And Jack didn’t care, because he’d already lost his chance with them, who saw the surprise storm in terms of an unexpected convenience, a fortunate excuse to ignore the world and responsibilities outside their beds.

But finally—oh, _finally_ , the brightest, widest eyes opened.  Excitement was the most contagious of winter maladies, and like his chains of frost on windows, one after another, the children blossomed to life.  They revelled in the perfect white landscape, untouched but for the most foolish and most determined and most desperate, few of whom actually managed to make it to their destinations and back without getting hopelessly stuck.  The brightness of the ground made up for the hidden sun, and in droves they bounded down stairs to shovel down a hurried breakfast before raiding the coat closets, all while their parents worried over what the sudden storm would mean for their underprepared pantries.  When finally they were bundled up, bulky snowpants tucked into boots, mittens clipped onto coat sleeves, hats tucked snugly over hair, they waddled to the door, shedding their parents’ overzealous hands.

Outside, Jack Frost was waiting for them, with a smile as bright as the snow, and they dashed past him to snatch up the sleds and tubes and trash can lids that had been withering in garage corners.  He followed as they converged on the neighborhood sledding hill, dampened their calls to one another so they had to shout at the tops of their lungs to be heard.  He slicked over the hill’s surface for the best rides and powdered the remainder of the snow when the more impatient began to hound riders with a volley of snowballs, and Jack didn’t care that his own ammunition got lost in the offensive.  He blinded bespectacled children whose lenses had yet to be tested by fog, sank the younger ones up to their knees, and iced up the snow beneath the biggest ones’ feet so that they left the greatest imprints in the white landscape.

The day wore on, and children left and arrived in shifts as their fragile endurance and empty stomachs dictated, but Jack played on tirelessly.  He had a snowball in hand and a chilly, ice-cracked laugh for every child who joined him that day, whether early on in the morning or into the evening.  As the sun set prematurely on the vast winter landscape, Jack sent a gentle wind to help buoy up the last of the exhausted children and sent them back inside for a warm dinner.  His heart skipped a beat every time a young pair of eyes would turn from the front door and glance longingly back at the hill as if it were a playmate they had to leave outside for the night.  In the soft, reluctant closing of those doors Jack swore he could hear their quiet whispers, begging for the land to be tomorrow as they’d left it today.  Convinced that the peculiar warmth growing in his chest meant the beginnings of belief were stirring in their hearts, Jack promised them just as softly that it would be. 

* * *

Thursday was sledding; Friday was war.  The plows had been through overnight but had only managed to shuffle around the contents of Jack’s storm, so that walls of hard-packed snow formed barriers at the ends of driveways, dividing one side of the street from the other.  A grinning Jack played the double agent, darting behind both sides of enemy lines to sow confusion.  As the day wore on, some of the north-siders began to defect, and, as if touched by the spirit of him, double-crossed their new fellows at the last moment, pelting them with snowballs from within their own boundaries, letting their hard-packed walls come tumbling down.

And Saturday was hiking, in the woods at the top of the hill, groups of children weaving in between hibernating trees and silent, frozen streams.  From behind rocky outcroppings, they pelted each other with snowballs as if reenacting the previous day’s battle, laughing and giggling and tossing snow like old war stories back and forth between each other.

Saturday was when the warmth in Jack’s heart began to burn with worry.  Every story they told, every story they recreated, mentioned every child who had been present, every person who had participated, except him.

On Sunday morning, just as the fragile sun was rising, casting its rays through the Earth’s thick atmosphere to leave paint in the footprints the children had left behind, Jack Frost sat perched upon his staff, his ice-blue eyes surveying what he had wrought.

Everything had gone the way it should have.  Everything.  He’d brought the snow in droves, when there should have been nothing but more dry coldness, more school, more work.  He’d granted them the tracks to race on, the battleground to fight on, the stage to play on.  He’d granted them freedom.  He’d granted them fun.

What else could he _do_?

* * *

_What else can we do?_  Blinking blearily, the neighborhood children climbed almost reluctantly out of their houses, murmuring this question to each other beneath the infant sun’s weak gaze.  What was there left to do, after the hill had been sledded on, the fortresses demolished, the mysteries of the white-masked woods uncovered?  They clustered beneath Jack’s gaze like witnesses to an emergency, peering down at the trampled snow at their feet like a soon-to-be-lifeless corpse.  His smile cracked down the center and fell into a frown.

This was his last day, his last chance this year, and he knew that.  The sun was struggling against his will, his power, and he knew that if he failed today he’d have to summon a whole new plan and a whole new storm, and how many times could he do it before the novelty and the fun had been drained out?  How many times, before the snow became dirty and gray underfoot, lining the sides of roads, its sparkle and magic gone?

This would be his last stand.  Jack leapt down from his perch to alight in the center of their bewildered ring and kicked up a sudden wind.  The children shielded their faces against his cold breath, but they could not defend against every flake, every miniscule speck of his power.  They blinked and rubbed the snow from their eyes, and _she_ , the little brown-eyed girl on whom Jack had been counting, _she_ was the one who gave him his perfect chance.

_Let’s build a snowman!_

And then everything changed, as if by magic.

Not just any snowman, they decided, huddled in a tight circle around the boy they couldn’t see.   _The_ snowman, the one painted on mugs and Christmas ornaments, the one that graced season’s greetings cards and sweatshirts and signs in stores.  The little brown-eyed girl took charge, her inner spirit glinting brighter than the others.  She sent Josie off to fetch the red scarf, Bobby off, back into the woods, to find the perfect matching sticks for arms.  The Franklin brothers knew where their mother kept the coal for the summer’s barbecues, and little Stephanie could pluck her grandpa’s pipe from his slackened jaw well before he woke up for the afternoon soaps.  While the older, stronger children set to work, rolling up their past few days of fun into the snowman’s body, Dara, the little brown-eyed girl, stole back into her house without stripping off so much as a mitten and dashed up the attic stairs to fetch the crowning touch.

 Jack Frost watched these preparations with interest, surprised at the attention to detail.  If the little girl had been perhaps a little older, he’d no doubt she would have returned with a calculator, to form the proper proportions by numbers instead of by eye.  But her gaze was sharpened by faith, and as each child returned one by one with their burdens, she helped build the snowman’s chest and head.  Her older sister lifted the younger children, one by one, so they could add their findings to the portrait made of snow: stick hands were kept warm by mittens that matched the red scarf tied fashionably about his neck, and on one side he held a broom, rescued from the driveway-clearing efforts of the morning before.  The snowman’s face took shape, and the dimensions of the coals that made up his eyes gave him a mischievous, sprightly look.  By the time the pipe and the button had taken up residence as his mouth and nose, Jack knew what to do.

Dara’s sister lifted her onto her shoulders, while Jack sauntered jauntily beneath the black silk hat in her small hands, imagining himself a long-ago dandy, just for a moment.  As soon as the hat touched their snowman’s head, Jack snapped back to himself and then darted inside, giving their creation a much needed heart.

Snow was exciting, but nothing special.  A sudden storm was uncommon, but they had happened before.  Jack needed something more, something that could not be explained away with science or logic.  They needed something to believe in, beyond all belief.

The broomless mitten gave a twitch, as if swaying in a breeze.  A great flurry of snowflakes rustled about the motionless snowman, forcing the gathered children back in surprise.  By the time it died down, the snowman had sprouted legs; the coals of his eyes shone with their inner fire, and an undeniable grin split the snow around the pipe.  The children around Dara gasped; her sister tightened her grip around the ankles of her boots.  But Dara reached forward, her brown eyes wide and bright, and brushed against the peculiar warmth of the snow that made up a vast white cheek.

“Hello, Mr. Snowman,” she said.

Jack reached up—mittens upon stick arms were ungainly but not impossible—and doffed his hat in her direction.  Then he straightened, experimentally bent his snowy knees, and did a little jig around the circle they had cleared for him, his usual grace lending an extraordinary quality to the snowman’s bulk.  Slowly, around the rim of the crowd, smiles caught on, and surprised laughter burbled up.  Dara took to her feet again and scrambled forward to peer up at him with a smile that could melt the thickest ice.

“Frosty,” she said.  He could have cried.

Instead he whooped, and danced, and laughed in relief, bounding between the bespelled children with his broomstick raised like a trophy, and they echoed his laughter as if they could hear it, chanting his name: Frosty, Frosty, _Frosty_!

He bounded up the sledding hill and they chased after him, trying to catch at his heels, his broomstick, the red fringes of his scarf.  Once at the top, he plucked the littler Franklin boy up from beside his older brother and placed him on the snowman’s round belly, then slid down the hill on his back, head first.  Then he climbed to the top amidst their pleading and did it all over, nine times in all, and then all over again, before he thumped off to their war-torn battlegrounds.

North and south sides had been bisected by a nearly cleared road and then further damaged by shoveled walkways and salted sidewalks, but Jack did not let that stop him, or the children who clustered around him like rabbits in their burrows.  ”C’mon!” he shouted, forming a snowball within his mitten, and with a great cheer the children complied, surrounding him, imbuing their game with his presence.  They protected him, then turned on him, then divided into alliances that melted and solidified faster than any of them could keep track.

When Jack called for them to follow him, back into the woods, they obeyed as if they were his army, and he their commander, and he led them on a campaign through the tree branches dripping with melting snow, led them in hurling snowballs at imagined foes and startled deer, who were far too quick to be concerned with such nuisances.

By now their shadows had begun to lengthen again.  The children had forgotten their exhaustion and their hunger in favor of the excitement Frosty brought, but Dara noticed when the sun began to sink to the level of her eyes.  She reached up and tugged on the dangling end of the snowman’s scarf, and as the other children scrambled on ahead, he knelt down by her side.  Jack felt a thrill rise up inside his chest at her attention.

“Frosty,” she said, and Jack nearly got lost in her broad, encompassing gaze, “will you still be here tomorrow?”

A faint smile split the snowman’s face, and he laid a mittened hand lightly on her small shoulder.  ”The sun’s gonna be out tomorrow for sure,” he explained gently, to her crestfallen face. “And all this snow will melt away.  So I’ll have to go too.”

While he had never before been believed in, Jack Frost had felt the force of the children’s excitement over him buoy him up like air in a balloon; now, with that little brown-eyed gaze turned upon him so forlornly, Jack felt the sting of disappointment that went along with expectations he could not uphold.  He tightened his grip gently on Dara’s shoulder and leaned in closer as if imparting a secret.

“Don’t worry,” he promised. “I may be gone by tomorrow, but if you build a snowman again the next time it snows, I’ll be back.”

“You promise?” she sniffled, rubbing at her eyes with the backs of her brightly-colored gloves.

“I promise,” said Jack, and he grinned at her once more. “But now, let’s catch up with the others.  There’s still time to have fun!”

“Right!”

Jack swung Dara up onto his tall snowman shoulders and hurried off after the children, who were calling him from the distant, thicker parts of the woods.  But their campaigns were cut short, as those calls were echoed by ones further away still, older voices dragging them inside with promises of warm dinners and warm cocoa and warm beds.  Stephanie’s grandpa added his haggard voice to theirs, yelling for his pipe.

One by one, the children slowed to a halt, the disappointment plain on their faces as one by one, they turned to their Frosty and hugged him goodbye.  Though he was made of snow, they were immune to the chill that surrounded him, and they pressed their faces into his soft, round belly even as their tears help speed along his melting.

“Goodbye, Josie,” Jack murmured, as she unwound his red scarf.

“Goodbye, Bobby,” he said, as the young boy reached up to pluck the sticks from his sides and removed the broom, the red mittens.

“Goodbye, Stephanie.”  Gone was his pipe.  Gone went the button that had acted as his nose.  Gone went his dark coal eyes, each palmed in a hand of the Franklin brothers as he gave them his farewells.

“Goodbye, Dara,” he whispered at last, as she reached up from her sister’s arms to remove his hat.

“Goodbye, Frosty,” she said, tears streaming hot down her cheeks.

He stepped out of the blank, motionless body of snow as they turned as one to head for home.  ”Don’t worry, guys,” Jack Frost said hurriedly. “I’ll be back again someday!  The next time it snows…”

But they walked on, as if ignoring him, or— _or_ , Jack suddenly realized, his chest feeling suddenly cold again (and since when had the cold bothered _him_?)—or they could not hear him.  Or their belief had been for Frosty alone, and not the spirit who had inhabited him.

Jack held the sharp icicle firmly in his chest as he hovered over the town, watching as the children returned home with the pieces of themselves they had placed in him, only to snatch them away again.  He watched as they ate dinner with damp hair and drank hot cocoa with tiny marshmallows bobbing on the surface, and wondered bitterly if the melting white morsels reminded them of a sad, discarded friend.  He watched them get tucked into dry beds.  Just as the Sandman was sweeping through for the night, before the moon could fully rise, Jack retreated from their town, leaving the warmer air lingering from the sun to sweep away every last reminder of him.

It snowed only once more in their town that winter, a wet, slushy thing on a dreary February afternoon.  Despite her urging, the little brown-eyed girl had to build up her snowman by herself, but he sat motionless on the curb with her, sad and sloppy and featureless.  By the time Dara returned empty handed, without the old hat her mother refused to let her borrow, her efforts had already melted away.


End file.
